[Rumori] Walmart sued for selling a cd with the word "fuck" on it.

[matt davignon]

If you thought Walmart was run by overly sensitive censorship folks, try the 
shoppers! I wish I got $75k each time I heard the word "fuck" at age 13!


Wal-Mart sued over Evanescence lyrics

HAGERSTOWN, Md. (AP) — Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which promotes itself as a 
seller of clean music, deceived customers by stocking compact discs by the 
rock group Evanescence that contain the f-word, a lawsuit claims.

The hit group's latest CD and DVD, Anywhere But Home, don't carry parental 
advisory labels alerting potential buyers to the obscenity. If they did, 
Wal-Mart wouldn't carry them, according to the retailer's policy.

But the lawsuit claims Wal-Mart knew about the explicit lyrics in the song, 
Thoughtless, because it censored the word in a free sample available on its 
Web site and in its stores.

The complaint, filed Thursday in Washington County Circuit Court, seeks an 
order requiring Wal-Mart to either censor or remove the music from its 
Maryland stores. It also seeks damages of up to $74,500 for each of the 
thousands of people who bought the music at Wal-Marts in Maryland.

"I don't want any other families to get this, expecting it to be clean. It 
needs to be removed from the shelves to prevent other children from hearing 
it," said plaintiff Trevin Skeens of Brownsville.

Skeens said he and his wife, Melanie, let their daughter buy the music for 
her 13th birthday and were shocked when they played it in their car while 
driving home.

Wal-Mart, of Bentonville, Ark., has no immediate plans to pull the CDs from 
its shelves, spokesman Guy Whitcomb told The (Hagerstown) Herald-Mail. He 
said the company will investigate the allegations. No hearing dates have 
been set.

"While Wal-Mart sets high standards, it would not be possible to eliminate 
every image, word or topic that an individual might find objectionable," 
Whitcomb told the newspaper.

He told the Herald-Mail that the song sample online was censored by 
Walmart.com, a separate division of Wal-Mart.

Whitcomb didn't return telephone calls Friday from The Associated Press.

The lawsuit also names as defendants Wind-up Records LLC, the New York-based 
company that recorded the music and decided not to apply parental-advisory 
stickers; and distributor BMG Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony BMG Music 
Entertainment, of New York.

Sony BMG declined to comment on the lawsuit. Wind-up didn't return calls 
from the AP.

The Skeens' lawyer, Jon Pels of Bethesda, said he aims to "take this case 
national, even if that means going state by state."

He dismissed Whitcomb's suggestion that Wal-Mart stores didn't know about 
the censored version of the song. "They are a multimillion-dollar 
corporation and they certainly can communicate among their various 
entities," he said.